New Xbox Live apps coming soon helps find friends

During E3, Microsoft announced some new and interesting updates coming to the Xbox One before the year’s end. These included the arrival of background music, which we’re still waiting on, and three friend-making apps. The three newly announced apps are Clubs for Xbox Live, LFG (Looking for Gamers) and Arena for Xbox Live.

Starting this fall, gamers on Xbox Live will be able to create and join Clubs. Club members can chat, set up parties, play games together, and share content with the club across your Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, and mobile phones through the Xbox app. There will be Clubs for everything. For example, there will be Clubs for gamers who love drifting cars in Forza, or Minecraft players who work together to make scale replicas of Star Wars spaceships, or you can create a Club filled with just your closest friends just to make it easier to game and stay connected on Xbox Live. Clubs will give gamers a community that they can return to again and again, and a place where shared interests, cultures, and playstyles come together to make connecting with people you love to play with more fun.

Looking for Group on Xbox Live allows gamers to browse and send “want-ad” like posts to the Xbox Live community, helping you to quickly connect with other gamers looking to accomplish the same goal. One of the challenges that LFG addresses is the frustration gamers feel when trying to join or set up a group to complete daily quests, raids or hunt Achievements. If you’re getting matched with random people, you may have the same skill set but other factors like amount of time to play, play style, even chat preferences may not be aligned – resulting in an activity taking longer, players dropping from the group, or general frustration between members. While there are other ways online to find people to group up with, we wanted to reduce the time it takes to find the best group of people without having to leave Xbox Live. To make it easier, we’re building LFG for all games across Xbox One and Windows 10. Whether you’re playing an FPS on Xbox One or your favorite PC title – with LFG, you can quickly find other gamers to play with on Xbox Live.

Arena on Xbox Live will make eSports more accessible so that players of all-skill levels have the opportunity to experience and participate in competitive online gaming. Arena is an online tournaments platform across Xbox One and Windows 10 PC, which offers a number of benefits for gamers, including discovering tournaments, easy registration, notifications, launching directly into your match, and automatic reporting of results. Players will also be able compete for prizes, and of course don’t forget bragging rights.

For Arena, Xbox have partnered with leading eSports organizers like FACEIT, ESL, MLG and more and are working with developers to bring games such as Killer Instinct, Gears of War 4, Halo Wars 2, World of Tanks, Smite and H1Z1: King of the Kill. We’re also excited to announce that EA will be bringing some of their biggest games like FIFA to Arena in the coming years. The thrill of competitive online gaming is coming to everyone. The community can look forward to start competing in Killer Instinct through the FACEIT app later this summer.